‘Japan’s Beethoven’ says he didn’t write his music
Print Edition
A DEAF composer dubbed Japan’s Beethoven has confessed to hiring someone to write his most iconic works, leaving duped broadcaster NHK red-faced, and casting a cloud over a figure skater set to dance to his music at the Winter Olympics.
Mamoru Samuragochi, 50, shot to fame in the mid-1990s with classical compositions that provided the soundtrack to video games including Resident Evil, despite having had a degenerative condition that affected his hearing.
Samuragochi became completely deaf at the age of 35 but continued to work, notably producing “Symphony No. 1, Hiroshima,” a tribute to those killed in 1945.
In 2001, Time magazine called him a “digital-age Beethoven.”
“I listen to myself,” Samuragochi told the magazine. “If you trust your inner sense of sound, you create something that is truer. It is like communicating from the heart. Losing my hearing was a gift from God.”
His reputation grew when public broadcaster NHK aired a documentary last year entitled “Melody of the Soul,” in which it showed the musician meeting survivors of the 2011 tsunami.
But yesterday the composer’s life was revealed to have been a fraud, and an NHK anchor apologized for having aired the documentary.
The broadcaster quoted Samuragochi as saying: “I started hiring the person to compose music for me around 1996, when I was asked to make movie music for the first time.”
Japanese figure skater Daisuke Takahashi has been caught up in the row. His program in Sochi includes a dance to a sonatina allegedly by Samuragochi.
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